We
can speak of imaginary worlds as two pretty different kinds of pretending: the
pretending that becomes public art (in our case, the art of literature) and
the pretending that remains essentially private "daydreaming."

IMAGINARY WORLDS
IN A "PRIVATE DAYDREAM"The private
daydream is a private or unconscious attempt to fulfill a private or unconscious
desire. Even if it's a conscious desire, we make no demands on our daydreams.
If they appear random, disordered, aimless or pointless that's okay. The "point"
is private anyway. And even if there appears to be no point, that's okay. The
point can remain completely unconscious or completely private and the daydream
isn't any less personally meaningful or personally satisfying.

IMAGINARY WORLDS
IN "PUBLIC ART"As "public art" literature is a very conscious attempt to fulfill
our deep-rooted desire for meaning by creating an orderly structure that has
meaning. The roots of literature are in the mythic stories we've been telling
since the dawn of languagestories that explain the meaning of the cosmos,
the world, the society, and the self. Literary structure may be conventional
or innovative, but either way it presents us with a structure built for meaning.
the art of literature is the art of shaping experience, giving it a form designed
to make an impact, to have meaning.

An interesting
question: whose desire for meaning is fulfilled by the work of art, the writer's
or the reader's? I would say, both. That is the beauty of art. It is satisfying
not only to its creator, but to all of us.

If we say that
the art of literature is the art of "shaping experience," we're saying
that the imaginary worlds we enter create for us a kind of experience. I would
even say, they create a refuge.

IMAGINARY WORLDS
CREATE AN EXPERIENCE, A REFUGE

Whether public
art or private daydream, both kinds of pretending create a special kind of experience.
Stepping into an imaginary world is stepping into an experiencethe experience
of an "alternative reality" which in many ways is like a "refuge"
from the real world.

Why do we need
to experience alternative realities? Why do we need a refuge from the real world?
For starters:

To experience
a sense of wonder; to see something new and beautiful

To get ideas,
to refresh ideas, to revisit forgotten ideas; to expand our thinking; to arrive
at a new understanding; to become aware of what's true and what's false about
this reality

To experience
emotions we might not otherwise experience, visit places we might not otherwise
visit

To lift us out
of the mire of what's "impossible" and experience a fresh sense
of possibility

To express our
deepest ideals and aspirations

The reality all
around us can become invisible through familiarity. We can become unconscious
of it. We lose our sense of the wonder of it all. We had that sense of wonder
as children, but somehow we lost it as we grew older. The imaginary world yanks
us back into the position we were in when we were more naïve, before we
became the know-it-alls we are as adults. It steals us temporarily away from
all that humdrum familiarity, and when we return we are more aware; the blinders
are off.

Just like any experience
in life, literature can help us grow internally; if we're open to it there are
many different ways we can grow from it. But it's not a preacher. What it has
to "say" depends on the reader to a great extent. The more personally
engaged you are, the more you take away from the experience literature. Some
works have a profound impact, others don't. Some flavors please some people,
some don't. You have to find the flavor that pleases you personally, and then
literature can provide a rich, meaningful experience.

THE PURSUIT
OF MEANING

The imaginary worlds
we've visited in this course have been very different from one another but they've
all been places that provide a unique kind of experience.

Myth. We
explored several mythic stories whose sole purpose was to create meaning. The
myth's purpose is to explain the cosmos and our place in it. What is the nature
of this world we find ourselves in? How was it created? What's our place in
it? The myth directly answers these questions.

Genesis. Because
they acted on their free will instead of blind obedience, Adam and Eve were
ejected from the Garden of Eden, the original paradise that was created for
us and which was our first home. This world we find ourselves in is no paradiseit's
more of a punishmentbut it's ours. Human life is finite rather than
immortal because we are not Gods; we're only in the image of Godwith
God's "likeness" but not God's wisdom. Whatever we want to know,
we'll have to struggle for it. The meaning of life is to make the best out
of this situation, since we created it ourselves, and to avoid making the
same mistake again.

Inferno.
From ancient times, we jump to the middle ages, just before the Renaissance,
before what we might consider the modern era. The mythic stories compete with
other kinds of literature. One of the great artists of this period is Dante,
formerly a poet in the in the new courtly love tradition. Feeling the angst
of frustration and powerlessness, fighting despair, to defend against the awful
feeling that the meaning of life is slowly draining away, Dante boldly re-asserts
meaning by taking the long view of human life. Beauty may perish young, and
injustice may reign here for a little while, but the human soul is immortal
and when you take that long view you see the real consequences in the afterlife.
A fully fleshed out vision of this afterlife is completely realized in his greatest
work, The Divine Comedy, where perfect justice restores meaning to all our actions
by awarding them with just consequences, each of us individually. Although Dante
boldly asserts meaning by making us inescapably responsible for each and every
one of our actions, already we can see how meaning is contingent on faith, on
revelation; it surfaces only in a vision that's a promise of consequences to
comeonly visionary truth can rescue meaning that's in danger of draining
away. But if the vision is powerful enough, it can be done.

Brave New World.
From the middle ages fly past the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and
we arrive with a bump at the base of our modern era, to the time just before
our ownthe early 20th centurywhen it was becoming obvious how the
industrial revolution had radically changed our lives forever. What is the meaning
of human life in an age where science and technology have trumped nature, where
material values supplant spiritual ones, and where people have completely rejected
their freedom and individuality? Technology, materialism, and conformity all
threaten to make our lives not better, not more comfortable, but meaningless.
We think we're creating utopia, but we're really creating dystopia. Our "pursuit
of happiness" has taken a blind turn and we're chasing it in a way that
threatens to dehumanize us. We're confusing "comfort" with "happiness"
and "numbness" with "pleasure." Although Huxley projects
the Brave New World 600 years into the future, its roots are right here, right
now. A "comfortably numb" existence, whether now or in some imagined
future, is dehumanized and meaningless.

Waiting for
Godot. Last but not least we confronted Samuel Beckett's tragicomic vision
in Waiting for Godot, where "faith" and the pursuit of happiness are
equally rejected in favor of an existentialist view of the cosmos. Faith in
a "savior," a Godot, seems tragically futile in the context this play
creates. However, the characters' inability to maintain even the slightest feeling
of well being or "happiness" without Godot is a frequent source of
comedy as well. In the battle for certainty, for absolutes, uncertainty wins
in Waiting for Godot. If you want certainties, there are precious few: we exist,
we suffer. In the absence of any uplifting absolutes, any firm or certain truths
other than the plain fact of our suffering existence, it may seem as if Beckett's
masterpiece is a dark, depressing vision of meaninglessnessthe exact opposite
of Dante's. But think about it another way. Real faith is never about certainty.
Faith without doubt is not faith. Didi and Gogo are highly doubtful that Godot
will come, but they're waiting anyway. Theirs is a tragicomic faith, but it's
a faith nonetheless. Faith in what, you are probably asking. But Beckett leaves
that completely up to you to decide. Faith in what? Meaning may be contingent
on faith, just as in Dante, but it is not contingent on certainty, and it is
not to be found in any false absolutes.

IMAGINARY WORLDS
AND REALITY

We've spent a semester
hopping from one alternative reality to the next. We've had to leave behind
many of the familiar ground rules we ordinarily operate upon. We've had our
expectations frustrated, reversed, and in some cases exploded all together.
That is the nature of the fantastic, and the value of itit offers us the
unexpected, the unpredictable, the brand new.

In Kafka's "Before
the Law" the doorkeeper blocks the man's way, denies him admittance to
the law. Permission denied, the man from the country sits by the gate waiting
to get in for his entire life. Nothing in his experience gives him any power
to gain entrance. He's trapped outside. As he's about to die the doorkeeper
announces that the gate, which was made for this one man alone, would be shut
forever. Perhaps this absurdity, this meaninglessness, might have been avoided
if there had been a sign above the gate that had motivated the man to take action:
"Abandon all hope, ye who fail to enter here." A simple sign, an alternative
course of action. His own experience wouldn't allow him to imagine this possibility,
but if some had been there to imagine it for himthat he could rise from
the stool and push his way through the gate-then perhaps he might have the found
the justice he was seeking. A simple, meaningful sign might have done the trick.